


True Love Waits

by scibher



Series: Any time, any place [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, This is basically just to end the series, yeet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 04:00:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17257172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scibher/pseuds/scibher
Summary: It was the only thing he could be certain of- love was eternal.





	True Love Waits

How could it be explained- how could that cycle, as continuous and reliable and high as the moon be explained?

It was a thousand things, thousands upon thousands upon thousands- and yet it was nothing. Real and yet not real.

A tour of the Winter Palace. Staring up at a painting of some prince, done with such tender care- each dark wave of hair, some unspeakable eye color- what was it about old paintings that made them look so light, so much more real than real life? And the artist’s signature at the bottom, the same L as the signature on the back of his credit card. Strange, he thought, stepping away, and when he turned, he met the eyes of a man that had not been there before- tours overlapping, poor time management- and as their eyes locked he felt a tugging somewhere in his soul ( _Look! See! Again!_ ), those same dark waves, those same eyes of unspeakable colors. The other man knew it too- his mouth was curling up in a smile.

Eyes locking across rooms, streets, battlefields. Those same gears meeting, turning, pushing the cycle onwards. Years upon years. Centuries upon centuries. Different names, different places, same tug of recognition.

It didn’t always work. A young man, loyal to the Medici, watched with worried eyes as Machiavelli was taken in chains to be whipped. Centuries later, a different time, different place, a man was tuning the family radio to listen to the local archbishop give mass again. His wife didn’t understand, and neither did he. She accepted his excuse of liking the Latin, having studied it in school, but he could tell she didn’t believe it. Why would she? It was strange, he knew, for a Jewish man to listen to a Catholic mass more than he went to the Synagogue- but stranger still was the effect of the archbishop’s voice, tainted though it was by the crackling of the radio. And turn the cycle back thousands of times- Achilles weeping over the body of the archbishop, unrecognizable though it was to the naked eye, taking instead the form of Patroclus.

And sometimes one would die too soon, in the crib, in the womb, as a child. In one life a boat captain, sailing for something he couldn’t put into words, something he would never find- a man sitting in what would later be known as South Sudan. The captain returned home, after years of sailing, and wondered why his wife’s hand on his cheek, why his smiling child, sitting on his knee with the same dark waves on his head- wondered why it didn’t feel entirely real.

A painter and a poser. A poet and a muse. In one life he watched the first production of Hamlet, not even listening to the words, but straining to see the blond playing Hamlet- ‘ _O that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!’_ And in another he was sat in Paris, in November of 1907, his small, pocket-sized Shakespeare plays in a bag near his feet, and he glanced up at the Notre Dame, not knowing that in a hundred years his (stolen) collection would be swept up and sold for twenty euro a piece in the as-of-yet unbuilt rare bookstore, just opposite the Notre Dame. He flipped open the book, annotating in his native tongue- German- and then Act One, Scene Two, Line One Hundred and Thirty- had he studied this as a child? Seen the play and simply forgot? Why did he know those words? And then he glanced up at the sky, annoyed at the clouds for covering the sun- but before him stood a young man no older than himself, hair illuminated like an angel’s halo as he tore his baguette in two, goat’s cheese and smoked ham, offered out like nothing ( _rich boys don’t know they’re alive,_ he thought); “ _tu as l'air affamé,”_ he said as he sat down next to him, and Michael was hungry- for the baguette, yes, but there was a deeper hunger, a hunger in his soul. Five years later, whispers of war between their countries haunting every street, Lucifer simply snorted, pulling on rich-boy threads until they were booked onto some ship bound for America. _Rich boys don’t know they’re alive,_ he thought again as the ship sank, Lucifer shaken but not as disturbed as he should have been as they huddled together in the lifeboat. “ _We’re_ alive, aren’t we?” Lucifer would say three years later, sat across from him in some New York restaurant, stirring his espresso with a silver spoon, concerned but not understanding why Michael was fretting over the war.

And there were others. Other loves. Other letters written and received, hair and portraits kept in lockets, small vials of perfume kept in pockets. Sleep patterns were lost as hands reached under pillows for a phone, _one more message_ , eyes straining at the blue light, texts and comments and snaps sent in the dead of night. And it would take a glance for it to fall away. A rich man, a lord, in fact, walking through London at night- his lover was allergic to horses, and he didn’t want her to be sneezing because of him. His eyes met with the beggar’s across the street- and then he was having his servants run the beggar a bath, fetch him some clothes- black velvet would bring out the blue of his eyes, the gold of his hair.

A cardinal and an artist, meeting in the dark corridors of the Vatican palace. A Versailles priest being whisked away by a soon-to-be French revolutionary who knew what was coming- because of course they were drawn to revolutions, old souls that they were, who knew to strike when the chance came. A Yank stared down the barrel of his gun, unable to shoot the dark-haired redcoat. 1919, a double agent’s letters to London dried up- dead, perhaps? Or simply unable to write? Neither, as it turned out- he was in a small house, miles from his supposed base in Dublin, sat closer to his comrade than he needed to as they read the instructions by candlelight, hands brushing as they traced the map together. They were the last two up, the rest asleep, the only light on for miles- lone house on a hill, nothing but green for miles around. Their eyes met- he had been writing a description of him when he had decided to switch sides. Words had failed him when he tried to describe his eyes. Now, lips stained with wine, they both gave a smile- to themselves? To each other? To the cycle that would keep on turning and turning, whether in the cold spheres of heaven or the maddening circles of hell or the many lands of Earth- and their lips pressed against each other’s, for the first time, for the thousandth time.

In England, 1518- a Catholic nobleman hid a correspondent of Martin Luther in his estate (“you fool,” he said fondly, reaching beneath the golden hair to trace the shell of his ear, “King Henry will never fall for Luther’s tricks.”). Cuba, 1957, tackling him to the ground before the bullets started to fly, _“get down!”_.  1984, Burkina Faso, hands brushing as they listened to Sankara give his speech. 1745, he saw the innocuous looking farm-boy who was one of many planning to get Charles Edward Stuart on the throne, if intelligence was to be believed. He threw a punch- planning to use his sword after that, but he needed to stun the boy. The boy looked up at him from where he’d fallen, the blood on his mouth shocking beneath his light hair, and Michael he didn’t move for his sword as the boy took his hand- his knuckles bloody too, skin torn from the punch- and pressed it to his mouth, wound upon wound, blood mixing with blood, some forgotten ritual, some forgotten life- cycle upon cycle upon cycle, moon waxing and waning, new and gone, full and maddening, red like blood, blue like tears. Reincarnation was meant to teach a lesson, but what lesson was there here? It was the same story, the same first kiss, the same love sweeping through them and letting them damn the rest of the world- in Ireland, France, Cuba, Argentina, Rome, by the shores of Troy- eyes meeting across a graveyard, across the Cage in Hell- _we’ve been here before. Do we know each other-? We must…_

 1917. A Bolshevik lit a cigarette in the Winter Palace, tossing his box of matches down the stairs to where Lenin stood, hands raised to catch. He trailed around the rooms, gun on his shoulder, dizzy from the gilding, the traces of the royal rituals that captured people’s minds beyond reason- not unlike Versailles, he thought, though he had never been ( _right?_ ). He drew deeply on his cigarette ( _why did it remind him of cherries? Why did the smell remind him of the night sky, tainted with orange?)_ , watching the smoke linger amongst the glamour and gild- until his eyes fell on a portrait. That prince was dead, surely- long dead, decades ago- and yet, for reasons he didn’t understand- and wouldn’t, not in that lifetime, he rushed to hide it.


End file.
